The kraziest of penguins

The latest version of Ubuntu 16.04 aka Xenial Xerus has been available for all desktop, cloud editions and servers.

For the multiplatform usages, four key technological advancements have been included in Ubuntu 16.04. For the first time, it happened that the mainframes support the platform that makes it one of the most powerful and largest Linux systems in the world.

In order to build the base for different IT sectors, the foundation of Ubuntu has been added faster and simplified software delivery.

Let’s have a look on the latest editions and features of Ubuntu 16.04 aka Xenial Xerus.

Snappy Innovation

For all Ubuntu desktop editions, the vital innovative feature is Snap that is a new packaging format running with .deb alongside the usual packaging format available for Debian-based Linux distributions.

Snap is able to deliver newer apps to the desktop users and it is its vital feature. Moreover, all the updates as well as dependencies are managed in a transactional way.

Due to its isolation policies, Snap is able to provide greater security as it has been originated from the advancement of Ubuntu phone. Therefore a companion technology ‘Snapcraft’ has been developed to make packaging and development of Snap apps easier.

More Advanced Cloud and Container Platform

The great feature about Ubuntu 16.04 is that it brings LXD, a pure-container hypervisor that enables to provide 14 times density along with faster speed for Linux guest in comparison to traditional virtualization. This LXD is the part of LXC 2.0 which is the most up-to-date release of Linux Container project. Therefore, companies will gain significant benefits for time-sensitive work on the cloud infrastructure by using LXD as the hypervisor. Moreover, they also get the advantage of cost of infrastructure in larger portfolios for inactive guest workloads.

Better Security and Timing

If you are looking for better protection for your data center environments, the new Snap application package may draw your interest because of its advanced security features. At present, there is a great demand for the container-supported virtualization in OpenStack environments and in this respect the LXD hypervisor is highly effective.

Even according to the claim by the company, Ubuntu is the most popular OS used for the cloud deployment. The prediction is that containers have bright future in the application deployment because of the support level around the containers from full-size cloud providers as well as legacy vendors. Since LXD brings in host-level security, therefore it is obvious that containers running LXD also acquire the VM level security without the requirement of running a full operating system.

Additional Features

There are also additional features offered with Ubuntu 16.04 including the support for ZFS-on-Linux which is the combination of filesystem and volume manager. It helps to provide efficient snapshots, uninterrupted integrity inspection against data fraud, copy-on-write cloning, data compression and automatic filesystem repair.

Moreover, the storage improvement in this Ubuntu version supports CephFS that is a distributed filesystem providing a suitable platform for the major enterprise storage for the open technology of cluster computing